A management point is the primary point of contact between the Configuration Manager 2012 R2 clients and the site server. All site servers that host clients must have at least one management point installed; this includes primary site servers and secondary site servers. A management point installed at a secondary site server is known as a proxy management point. Clients use the management point to retrieve and send all data to and from their assigned site server; this includes retrieving settings and configuration via the policy and forwarding operational data such as inventory, state messages, status messages, discovery information, and more. In addition, clients will send requests to the management point requesting help locating content they may need, such as finding which distribution points are available to the client and contain needed software update or software package content or even the location of a software update point used in software update scanning.
Once a management point receives data from the client, it will be further analyzed and converted into a form acceptable by the site server and then forwarded to the site server for further processing. This also includes content location requests, but in these cases there is no data to forward to the site server. Instead, the management point will execute queries against the site database and return that information to requesting clients.
Here are a few things to remember about management points:
◆ Every primary and secondary site must have a management point specified.
◆ The Central Administration Site cannot host a management point.
◆ Management points require access to the site database for certain operations.
◆ Management points require a local installation of IIS to be installed.
◆ Management points make use of BITS when moving content, depending on size, to help avoid impacting network utilization.
Also of interest for management points is that they no longer have a dependency on WebDAV. Add to this that management points are now treated similarly to distribution points in that they can be placed where needed to support clients. In previous releases of Configuration Manager, the only way to host multiple active management points at a site was by using a network load balancer as a front end. Now management points are simply looked up by clients—similar to distribution points—and the best choice at a site is returned to the client. This statement may cause you to ask how exactly clients learn about possible management points. There are a couple of ways. It’s possible to specify a single or multiple management points on the command line when installing the client using the SMSMP switch. If Active Directory publishing is enabled, then clients will be able to look up the management point list from there as well. During client installation, and during ongoing client operation, they will learn which management point is optimum for their use through boundary groups—again, much the same as distribution points.
Another big shift for management points is that now the server locator point functionality is included in this role.
It may be that the management point role is already installed. One of the default settings when installing a primary or secondary site is to also add the management point role. If the role was not yet added as part of setup, then you will need to add it.
◆ The first choice on this page allows administrators to choose how clients should communicate with this management point, either by HTTP or by HTTPS.
◆ Administrators are also able to specify whether they want to receive an alert in the console indicating when the management point is unhealthy.
This is a new option for Configuration Manager 2012 R2, and it points to the basic monitoring capability that has been added. If this option is selected, administrators can find alerts generated in the Monitoring workspace of the console.
2. Click Next to continue to the Management Point Database page shown in Figure
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